It really depends:
It has a strong push your luck element, but also a lot of ways to mitigate bad luck:
What will usually kill you is lack of intel: if you go near a xeno infestation without knowing it, it can usually end your playthrough early on. Same goes for going in the middle of pirates.
But all of the talents you pick to get "rumors" will be instead of talents needed to get things done (among other things, operating your ship without damaging the ship or the crew).
Also, once you are OK with letting every pirate and military ship loot or inspect your cargo, you will die a lot less (alternatively, you can go all in and start with a bad ass ship, at the cost of gimping your own captain character).
So you need to have tolerance for RNG, but you must also have enough self awareness not to blame the RNG for all of your blunders (or the risks you take actually: You can very well risk ship combat, but you just must not ever pick a remotely fair fight if you want to survive in the game).
TLDR: There is a lot of RNG, but dying is usually your own doing, either because you wanted to maximize potential long term reward (and took risk), or went way over your head.
The problem is that it is very hard to do so without killing the pacing of space battles.
